What Happened Today: January 10, 2022
Israel’s growing China ties; Putin’s gambit; Post-liberalism
The Big Story
The story of Israel’s new port in Haifa, built by a Chinese company after no American companies bid for the contract, provides a window on the shifting alliances and great power conflicts of the 21st century. Israel’s trade relationship with China has grown from being worth roughly $1 billion in 2001 to some 10 times that today, with most of the value coming from Chinese exports to Israel. American officials voiced objections to the port deal, as Matti Friedman recounts in an article in today’s Tablet describing Israel’s growing ties to China. But the sentiment in Israel is less suspicious of China, which is seen not as a competitor but as a dominant global power and potential partner for Israel’s expanding economic and security interests. A 2019 Pew survey found that two-thirds of Israelis characterized their view of China as “favorable.” For U.S. respondents it was the reverse, with 60% saying they had an unfavorable opinion of China. In addition to building the new port in Haifa, China’s Shanghai International Port Group also holds a 25-year lease to operate it. On the ground, that means Israeli workers moving cargo using Chinese software supervised by Chinese executives in the managerial offices. “The new port has better tech, isn’t unionized, and pays its workers less. It plans to do the same work with a third of the staff,” Friedman writes. While Israelis handle the security at the port, there’s no doubt “the Chinese are in charge.” One early consequence of the Chinese taking charge in Israel is the suppression of criticism directed at China in university programs subsidized by the Chinese government, according to Friedman. But another is that Israel now has a powerful trading partner with close ties to Iran and an interest in maintaining peace in a region where it has just made a major commercial investment.
Read it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sectins/israel-middle-east/articles/chinese-itzik-haifa
Today's Back Pages: Exploring Post-Liberalism
The Rest
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iolent mass protests in Kazakhstan, which Russian and Kazakh leaders blame on “foreign meddling,” have ended abruptly after Russia deployed more than 2,000 troops to the country. The unrest appeared to be tied to a sharp rise in fuel prices but quickly spread across the country, leaving 164 people dead and almost 8,000 arrested and leading Moscow to view it as a threat to the Russian sphere of influence. “We won’t let anyone destabilize the situation in our home and won’t allow the so-called color revolution scenario to play out,” Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said Monday. The underlying message of Putin’s statement is that Russia won’t permit a replay of the Western-backed “color revolutions” that spread across a number of former Soviet countries in the mid-2000s and aimed to replace pro-Russian leaders with governments friendlier to NATO and Western powers.→
The subtext of Putin’s warnings about meddling in Kazakhstan is the ongoing talks over Ukraine between senior U.S. and Russian officials and, more broadly, concerns about NATO, the U.S.-led treaty alliance that Putin claims antagonizes Russia by operating on its borders. After placing close to 100,000 troops on its border with Ukraine, Russia is now using the threat of an invasion for leverage to gain security concessions from the U.S. and European countries.
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Don’t panic yet, but after a poor start to the year, markets have continued to show signs of fragility following a massive selloff of tech stocks, sparked by investors’ fears that continued inflation may lead the Fed to raise interest rates. The Nasdaq exchange is on its fourth straight day of losses and down more than 6% for the year, and it isn’t just due to tech stocks, as more than 70% of S&P 500 stocks have shown declines.
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Definitely don’t panic about the Deltacron, the dreaded new mutant strain of the novel coronavirus discovered in Cyprus on Saturday, which allegedly combines the worst of the Delta and Omicron varieties, like the monster from a B horror movie. Turns out it likely doesn’t exist and was “discovered” by accident—the result, most likely, of lab contamination
Read more: https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/coronavirus/1641831000-experts-deltacron-likely-result-of-lab-error
→ Radically redefining the meaning of “voting rights” in New York City, some 800,000 New Yorkers who are in the country legally but are not U.S. citizens will now be allowed to vote in municipal elections. The voting bill was approved by the city council in December; it now requires a new implementation plan due in July that will create a separate registration process for the new noncitizen voters and a separate balloting system that is supposed to prevent them from voting in state and federal elections, for which they remain ineligible to participate.
→ Water, at least, you can drink. Try surviving on digital tokens and Facebook likes.
A story is told about the residents of Chelm, that when they experienced a sour cream shortage they simply started calling water "sour cream."
No doubt, these same folks would have solved the Great Stagnation by calling life in a crumbling society "the metaverse."— Zohar Atkins (@ZoharAtkins) January 9, 2022
→ Schools remain closed for their fourth day in Chicago Monday, leaving some 300,000 students with nowhere to go as city officials and the teacher’s union remain unable to reach an agreement. Union officials are holding out for what they say are safe conditions for teaching in the midst of the Omricon wave and pushing for remote classes as an interim solution, while Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is insisting on a return to in-class teaching. In a statement Monday, union head Jesse Sharkey called Lightfoot “relentlessly stupid” and “relentlessly stubborn.” Meanwhile, a group of parents is suing the union, demanding that teachers return to schools and resume teaching.
→ “I simply don’t see how I or in fact any Jew who has any pride in that name can be associated with the Corporation anymore,” wrote British rabbi YY Rubinstein in an open letter explaining his decision to terminate his association with the BBC. Rubinstein’s resignation followed an incident in which a BBC report falsely claimed that a busload of Jewish students who were threatened and spit at during a ride in London had provoked the attack by using anti-Muslim slurs.
→ Bob Saget had two lives as a comedian: one as the wholesome host of "America’s Funniest Home Videos" and star of the kid-friendly sitcom "Full House," and another as a raunchy road comic. Saget died unexpectedly on Sunday at the age of 65. He was in Florida doing shows for his “I Don’t Do Negative Comedy Tour” when his body was found in a hotel room in Orlando. “No signs of foul play or drug use,” according to local law enforcement.
What Is Post-Liberalism?
Here is a political term of art and a buzzword that Scroll readers should be familiar with: post-liberal.
There is a large, influential body of thinkers who cross the left and right and appear in both the United States and Europe who see liberalism as a morbid system of politics that has lost the ability to address fundamental human concerns such as finding meaningful work and forming families. These thinkers don’t mean to criticize liberal politics but instead look to critique the underlying philosophy of liberalism going back to its roots in the Enlightenment. Post-liberalism attempts to transcend the primacy of individuals as political agents because it sees communities as the source of a deeper “relational” meaning and identity that can only be attained through social bonds.
In practice, post-liberals typically espouse some hybrid of conservative or traditionalist social policies and more left-wing economics that emphasize placing the “common good” above the profit motive and the government’s responsibility to administer the economy. A good place to start to understand the philosophy is with this open letter called “Against the Dead Consensus” that declares its opposition to “the soulless society of individual affluence”:
Our society must not prioritize the needs of the childless, the healthy, and the intellectually competitive. Our policy must accommodate the messy demands of authentic human attachments: family, faith, and the political community. We welcome allies who oppose dehumanizing attempts at “liberation” such as pornography, “designer babies,” wombs for rent, and the severing of the link between sex and gender.
That statement is emblematic of the religious, conservative side of post-liberalism associated with the magazine First Things, where the letter appeared, and writers like Sohrab Ahmari and Harvard Law’s Adrian Vermeule, who were among its signatories. But that is only one aspect of something that is far more expansive, more like a generational gestalt than a particular political ideology.
The Catholic variety of post-liberalism is among the most prominent and has gained attention for what its adherents call “a politics of the common good”; it prioritizes socially beneficial outcomes over contingent freedoms. Figuring out what to do when ideas about what constitutes “beneficial outcomes” clash—the great strength of the liberal, pluralist model—is a problem the post-liberals have tended to gloss over.
There are secular and left-wing and Jewish and Muslim strains as well, each with their own sensibiltiies and aims. What these various groupings share is the conviction that liberalism of the past half century, which combines sovereign individual rights with free-market economics backed by federal power and an interventionist foreign policy, has run its course. They disagree on whether this model of politics has fallen from its golden age or was always corrupted but share a common view that liberalism, writ large, is now roughly synonymous with the causes of America’s brokenness surveyed by Tablet’s editor Alana Newhouse.
These people are important and worth knowing both because their ideas, even when wrong, bring something fresh to what has become a stale political discourse in the United States that tends to recycle through the same tropes a few times a decade. Moreover, you are going to be influenced by those ideas, which are gaining currency in American intellectual life and politics, whether you like them or not.
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